Lauderdale, John, Part 2

ORAL HISTORY OF CARL “RABBIT” YEARWOOD AND JOHN LAUDERDALE
Tape 2
Interviewed by Bill Sewell, Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge
March 5, 1985
Interviewer: This is Bill Sewell, Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge. Today is March 5, 1985 and I’m talking to “Rabbit” Yearwood and John Lauderdale, longtime Oak Ridgers and early Oak Ridgers, about the recreation programming back in the 1940’s. John, Rabbit I appreciate you coming down today. The leisure services, as what we refer to them today was originally under the direction of the Recreation and Welfare Department. Could someone, Association, excuse me. Could someone explain what the Recreation Welfare Association was?
“Rabbit" Yearwood: I’ll attempt it and I’m sure John will jump in and add a word or two as we have in this free discussion. Recreation and Welfare Association was an organization set up by the Clinton Engineer Works, the builders of Oak Ridge, which in turn were under the Corps of Engineers which was overall our, you might say, Oak Ridge development in every way. The way they accomplished this was to set up Recreation and Welfare Association which was to be a self-sustaining organization and to operate under a council or a committee or a….
John Lauderdale: It was called a recreation council, which was made up of representatives from the operating contractors.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, some of those were American Industrial Transit, Roane Anderson Company, Dupont, Tennessee Eastman, Berkeley, Union Carbide and it seems like there might be, well, the Army had a representative on that I believe, because they participated in all the major city wide activities. I’m not sure.
Interviewer: Was Union Carbide a member back in those days or were they …? Mr. Yearwood: Union Carbide operated K-25 there. Dupont operated Oak Ridge National Lab area and Tennessee Eastman operated Y-12. Berkeley…
Mr. Lauderdale: Berkeley operated another separation plant. It was another alternate method of separating the U235 isotope, in addition to the gaseous diffusion and the electromagnetic separation at another, and all I know, I know a little about the principle of it except that they call it the steam separation, and it was evidently unsuccessful because, see the electromagnetic separation was the one that could produce a high enough enrichment to get the reaction. In other words, the two bombs that were used, the only two that have ever been used in combat, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were made from the products from the Y-12 plant. Effectively the gaseous diffusion, as of that moment, was not considered capable of producing a high enough assay to be used in explosives. And, later on it was upgraded, perfected and developed and it supplanted the electromagnetic because of the ???? bomb similar to what the other methods. Now the centrifuge and the laser acted on processes are on the horizon as far as replacing the gaseous diffusion.
Interviewer: John, did council, and Rabbit, the council that you spoke of a few minutes ago, the recreation council, was that a governing body? Did they have the authority to make rules and impose fees and so forth?
Mr. Yearwood: Yes, they, the council formed the operating unit known as Recreation and Welfare Association, and employed an executive director to manage the operation of the Recreation and Welfare Association. Then he set up the operation methods we had within recreation. We had a physical recreation department, a social recreation department, a nursery school. We had nursery schools. We had recreation centers, which were mostly under the direction of the social. They sponsored dances. Then they had the money making operations to offset the cost of participating activities. And, I think we touched on most on the first tape. We had movie theaters. We had the Ridge, Central and in Jackson Square area, and at Midtown, one at Grove Center and one in the Jefferson area. John, did we have one at Wheat, I mean at K-25 area?
Mr. Lauderdale: No. Wheat operation was separate and R&W never did have any activities there.
Mr. Yearwood: Only one time. That was at Christmas and I had to go out there and play Santa Claus.
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh did you? You know something that I don’t. They had a, I would think, limited, we went and discussed it several times, I don’t think we ever had any organization. They had a school….
Mr. Yearwood: I remember just before it happened -?Temp?- Jerrel and ???? and Shep Lauter and I all went to inspect the old Wheat High School with the possibility of taking it over as a recreation facility.
Interviewer: Where was that located? Wheat High School?
Mr. Lauderdale: Well if you, do you know where the road…
Mr. Yearwood: Route 137…
Mr. Lauderdale: From Highway 58 out there and goes over to Blair, goes through that road. About a few hundred yards off of present Oak Ridge Turnpike, Highway 58, there’s an old brick building. There was a church in there and a crossroads store, and a building that I believe was used for what they called in those days, a ?teachery? That was the place where the assembled teachers for the consolidated high school could keep a collective residence. Many of them were single women, some married women and I guess a few men. Mostly the teachers in those days were women and they would have a, well they run their own ???? facilities, living...
Mr. Yearwood: This was pre-Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah. That was pre-Oak Ridge of course.
Mr. Yearwood: But that was…
Interviewer: I think I know the area you are talking about, as you just turn right on Blair Road and just right around in that pine thicket over there on the corner, right.
Mr. Lauderdale: The building itself was redwood…they had a good size school now, on the other side.
Mr. Yearwood: The school is what we...
Mr. Lauderdale: Other side of the road and it was back in where the trailers residences or whatever they had.
Mr. Yearwood: That school was the elementary school, now. The other school that I was talking about we were about to take over for the recreation center, was what I thought was the Wheat High School.
Mr. Lauderdale: It was Wheat School, I assume it was high school.
Mr. Yearwood: It might have been Wheat School prior to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes.
Mr. Yearwood: Which they had built a new school within that trailer area, which was the largest trailer area in the whole operating… wasn’t it?
Mr. Lauderdale: Seemed like there was, I have the number 17,000. I don’t know whether that was population or...
Mr. Yearwood: That’s about right because I think there’s somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 trailers. Of course, I know they had bowling alleys down there, because they bought some old bowling alleys out of Knoxville from a place that I used to operate in previous years.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well they had a merchandising area I guess you say.
Mr. Yearwood: Oh yes, shopping area.
Mr. Lauderdale: Shopping area and gasoline filling station, you know, and things like that but that was down the hill. Now this area that was where they had the school and all the trailers and so forth, was on the high ground you could say...
Mr. Yearwood: To the left of the...
Mr. Lauderdale: Something like immediately off to the left of where the Blair Road takes off but on the other side of the Turnpike. These other buildings were down nearer to the plant area, and they were operated by the same people. I couldn’t, Howe Sharon ????Alexander, Frank Tucker, the man that was in H.T. Hackney, I’ve forgotten what his name was, and I believe the Chrysler Plymouth Dealer in Knoxville was Cunningham, something like that. Anyway I think there were six partners in this ????
Mr. Yearwood: But any recreation that was carried on in that area was carried on by J.A. Jones I guess, because I know that the first time I came to Oak Ridge, to come by to investigate a job, it was with J.A. Jones Company, and their headquarters were located along that 58 and, everything looked pretty promising until I says, at the end, well now how about some housing? And his answer ended the conversation. I went back to Fontana and waited until something else came up which was Recreation and Welfare Association but...
Interviewer: You were talking a few minutes ago, maybe on the other tape, when Oak Ridge had 75,000 people estimated at one time, back in the early 40’s. I would imagine the recreation facilities support for 75,000 including the shift workers and everything else, did we have recreation programming going around the clock?
Mr. Yearwood: We had it going around the clock. K-25 I know for instance, right where the entrance to Downtown is now, or about where Moby Dicks could be, from there back up to where the first Baptist Church is now, in that area, we had two softball fields, known as Farmer’s Market #1 and #2. They were assigned to K-25 and they had shift leagues. They had a league when that particular shift was working, then when they worked at 4 o’clock, well, they played in the morning prior to going to work, and ones that came off, say 11 to 7 also played morning leagues. I mean wherever that shift, whatever time they worked determined what time they played that week. And, I would say that K-25 probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 softball teams playing on those two fields. Of course Pinewood, present Pinewood Park was, I guess the original top grade softball park, and they had one at Elza, which is now Milt Dickens Field. They had two administration fields located back of the Administration Building. One of them I guess had a helicopter port built on it and that’s still there, plus we had two softball fields there. We had a softball field in back of the Jefferson Tennis Courts that the girls and women used exclusively at that time. We had Oakwood Baseball Park, which is now you know what…
Interviewer: Carl Yearwood.
Mr. Lauderdale: I’ve heard about that.
Mr. Yearwood: We also had a #2 baseball park just up from that, kind of in dead center field from it, that was first used for a practice purpose and then used a little later as a starting field for the boys’ baseball program in Oak Ridge. Now, right off I can’t think of any other softball fields.
Interviewer: Rabbit, with all this activity and 75,000 people, how did you have a, did they have a maintenance crew to maintain these fields at night and what about movie theaters, were they open twenty-four hours a day?
Mr. Yearwood: Oh, movie theaters were open early morning until late at night, because they were almost round the clock, because people were working, and there were more people working on each shift then than work now in all ???? So you really had three populations to provide for. Going back to softball, X-10 had their own leagues, Y-12 had their own leagues, and we had city leagues like fast pitch and slow pitch and most every type of softball, and the baseball teams they tended to have are about equal to the lower class professional league, they had some real fine ball players.
Interviewer: Is that the old Pioneer team?
Mr. Yearwood: No this was the...
Interviewer: Prior to that...
Mr. Yearwood: ...league but teams from each operator. AIT had a team, ???? had a team, Y-12, X-10, I mean it was a league. Now the Pioneers were one team, one pro team that played in a league with other cities.
Mr. Lauderdale: That was professional?
Mr. Yearwood: That was a professional league. But the early leagues that we had in Oak Ridge were about comparable in playing ability as that Pioneer league, but when the population dropped so much baseball gradually faded out of the picture as far as local sponsorship of individual teams was concerned.
Interviewer: About when did the population drop from a peak of 75,000+, when did you, do you all remember an approximate time when the population really started decreasing?
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh it started decreasing, I’d say within two or three months after the Hiroshima drop. I guess the Japanese surrender; I don’t know the month that was in, was it October ’47, ’46?
Mr. Yearwood: ’46.
Mr. Lauderdale: The European surrender was in the spring, after the April offensive, and the other was in…
Interviewer: So you started seeing a decrease in the population in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Yearwood: I would say over night.
Mr. Lauderdale: They began to, just right off close or stop construction, the first thing was affected was construction. Like Rabbit said the other day, a fellow had his hand up in the air he didn’t skip a nail he just put his hand in the air. All construction, all further development ceased.
Interviewer: John what did you do out at, in the early days in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lauderdale: Well, I was in charge of the maintenance caretaking along the R&W facilities, janitorial of course, of the buildings and some kind of caretakers for the outdoors, rather meager, but wasn’t ever satisfactory but we had such a … and also I had supervision of the beer sales.
Interviewer: I want to talk to you about that in a few minutes. I had a feeling that you were going to bring that up.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well I don’t advocate very much because I am certainly not ashamed, but I had such an opportunity. Really the facts are such that when I, if I could really quote the facts they would sound like tremendous exaggerations. Shall we go into that?
Interviewer: Yeah I think we’ve got a few minutes on this side of the tape. I’d like to talk about that beer sales?
Mr. Lauderdale: The reason for the excessive sales was that through the military, we had access to military allotments, and we could make a contact with breweries in this area, that is, the area of St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and so forth. This was territory that they would rather sell to for consumption within the continental United States than sell it to the military and ship it over seas, because they had a potential for building up trade territory, you know, for post war. I was told that the first money that actually came into the Recreation and Welfare was that they got a carload of beer and sold it. Now that was before I arrived, but I believe they sold it from that old recreation business down in Jackson Square.
Interviewer: Now you’re talking a carload, you’re talking about a train carload right?
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes.
Interviewer: Not a carload automobile.
Mr. Lauderdale: Not a highway car.
Mr. Yearwood: One day sale.
Mr. Lauderdale: And we did a tremendous business. I believe I covered that in the other tape the other day, about some of the quantities.
Interviewer: What was the price of beer back then?
Mr. Lauderdale: Only one that I specifically remember was Erdley 92, made in ????, it was shipped in the steinic bottle and it was $2.65 plus a deposit of 75 cents on the case and box.
Interviewer: $2.65 for a case?
Mr. Lauderdale: $2.65 for a twenty-four-bottle case. I believe that Berger sold for something over $3, and we had several other brands and we sold them, Weideman’s Royal Amber was one, and Narragansett, I think all the Narragansett came in that military.
Mr. Yearwood: I think that’s what we buried out there in Gamble.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah, that of course was Rhode Island Brewery, I know but from the Cincinnati area we had Fabarosa, was a Red Top Brewing Companies premium brand. Champagne Velvet was brewed somewhere in Indiana I believe, and seems to me we got something out of St. Louis…..and seems like we had one from Evansville. Since I have no records or anything it’s strictly memory.
Interviewer: John, did the revenue that was taken in from the beer go to offset in the R&W program?
Mr. Lauderdale: It went right into the revenue of the R&W program. We had a welfare payment and there was a welfare organization that dispenses, and I don’t know the individuals in it, I did know at the time, but we turned over and seems to me like $2,500 a month or $25,000 a year or something like that. We also published the Oak Ridge Journal newspaper, and it seems to me that Major Bill Bonnet’s sister was head of the welfare organization. I’m not sure. I know she worked for some, see these other entities such as the newspaper and the welfare and nursery school were somewhat operated independently. I didn’t have anything to do with the maintenance on their buildings they were somewhat removed and rather obscure to the...
Mr. Yearwood: Money to operate went to them?
Mr. Lauderdale: We just turned the money over to them and they spent it. We didn’t kind of keep their check registers and so forth.
Interviewer: Do any of you recall, or you might not have been involved in it, but do you recall what maybe the budget was for the R&W program? I’m sure it was probably broken down into several different areas but…
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh, I just don’t know. I worked on it and I abhorred it. It was a terrible thing to work on, but it seems to me like it was several hundred thousand dollars. I think I remember that the wholesale revenue from the theater was $100,000 for one year but it was up in the $100s total. Of course we had some minor revenue like charging for dances and things of that kind that furnished for certain activities, minor income, but the motion picture theaters and the sale of beer were the two large producers. We had a few concessions, for instance, a man had a popcorn stand at the Center Theater.
Mr. Yearwood: At every theater.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well, at Center Theater and Jefferson Theater. He was from Cookeville. I can’t remember his name but he paid us $1,075 a month for the privilege of running those popcorn stands and he had one at the Midtown Beer Tavern. He thought that was going to be a good deal to sell popcorn to go with beer. It was a total bust entirely….
[Side 2]
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Mr. Lauderdale: He was from Cookeville and he sent his brother down here. His brother was older than him, and he didn’t have anything very much to do, I think, and he came down here to run those popcorn stands. Now the one out at Jefferson Theater never made very much of a profit. See he had these three locations there, Jefferson Theater, Center Theater and Midtown Recreation Hall. He soon closed the one up at Midtown. The Jefferson Theater was never popular and it didn’t pay his popcorn business very much more than operation of it.
Interviewer: For the benefit of those that might listen to this tape, the Center Theater is now the Oak Ridge Playhouse in Jackson Square and the Jefferson Theater is used now by the Oak Ridge Dance Studio and it’s still located on Jefferson Circle. And of course the Midtown Theater is where the Civic Center is located, in the general vicinity, okay go ahead.
Mr. Lauderdale: He paid his brother for operating it and he told someone, and it came back to me, that he declared as income for that year, in 1946, $9,000 for himself. So you might say that that one popcorn stand paid $1,075 a month concession fee and the cost of labor and cost of supplies and cost of manager, whatever he paid his brother, and he paid him $9,000 out of that one popcorn stand, because the Jefferson one would just about break even and the Midtown one closed up after about two months of operation.
Interviewer: You know as a child, I remember I could go to the Center Theater on a Saturday, and for a quarter I could go to the Center Theater for 9 cents and see a couple of movies, a serial of cartoons and also buy popcorn and cokes because the cost of popcorn was not too expensive. He must have sold a lot of bags of popcorn in those days to make that kind of profit.
Mr. Yearwood: Everybody went into the Center Theater with a bag of popcorn ‘cause they’d go up and buy, everybody stood in line, nothing to do except eat popcorn while waiting at the ticket office.
Mr. Lauderdale: Someone else had a popcorn machine down at the bus terminal. And whoever that was I’m sure did alright ‘cause it was a lucrative business.
Interviewer: The bus terminal you’re talking about now is located at French’s Plaza or Security Plaza?
Mr. Lauderdale: That’s right in that same area.
Interviewer: Did we not have two bus terminals? Main bus terminals in Oak Ridge in those days?
Mr. Yearwood: Jefferson and Jackson Square.
Mr. Lauderdale: The Jefferson was down in right there, it’d be on the right, right hand side of the Jefferson Avenue as you go up.
Interviewer: And that’s where all the buses would drop the men and women workers off?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that was a transfer point.
Mr. Lauderdale: Transfer point. I’ve heard that number 900 buses that were operated here.
Mr. Yearwood: I wouldn’t be surprised because if you go out anytime and get on a bus, at first, I understand, you just got on it, and that was it you rode where you wanted to get off and you got off. Later they started charging a nickel, to get on and ride as far as you wanted to or transfer.
Mr. Lauderdale: I think that was after the war.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah.
Mr. Lauderdale: After the war, after the armistice was signed. But they had buses that ran to Maryville, Tazewell, and I guess down halfway to Chattanooga. I don’t know just where all they did run, I’m sure it went up past LaFollette.
Mr. Yearwood: There were an awful lot of independent bus drivers, bus operations in those days of Oak Ridge. But I remember when I first came in 1945, my family was still living in Fontana, North Carolina and I’d go up there on the weekends. But I would, on Saturday, I would, if I didn’t get away before the shift change, why I waited until after the shift change and all the buses were off the highway before I’d start to go to Knoxville. I mean it was a long straight line. And we didn’t have four lane highways at that time. We had one little two lane highway between here and Knoxville that went this way, or this way, or this way, zig zagged a good bit, because in those days, they were built, they had to build it out by John Jones, and that’s fictitious name, owned by Jimmy Smith, or somebody else, whereas today they build them straight but...
Mr. Lauderdale: We did have one road, what is now 62 into Knoxville was built during the war and later. It wasn’t completed until about the time the war was over as I remember.
Mr. Yearwood: That started out as a two-lane road, it’s still two lane.
Mr. Lauderdale: And the 25W road was completed out to Clinton by the time the war was over. They were working on it in, and then the four lane highway was completed.
Mr. Yearwood: One of the main routes into Knoxville was the 62 and the Clinton Highway which was, both of them were, two lanes, 62 to Knoxville now is a two way traffic highway, isn’t? It’s not four lanes…?
Interviewer: No it’s...
Mr. Yearwood: It’s two lane but...
Interviewer: Certainly the engineers that designed Oak Ridge are to be commended because of the hindsight, I guess, as far as developing the Oak Ridge Turnpike. Do you recall if the Oak Ridge Turnpike, of course there probably was not as many cars back then, because they had buses transporting the workers around, but do you remember it being heavily used, even back then?
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh yes.
Mr. Yearwood: It was the only thoroughfare. Tennessee Avenue catches a lot of traffic now. I notice Emory Valley catches a lot of traffic, and it’s broken up now, but it couldn’t have handled in those days what the thoroughfares in Oak Ridge handle now.
Interviewer: Were there bike trails back in those days, Rabbit?
Mr. Yearwood: No.
Interviewer: I know there were trails connecting communities or streets.
Mr. Yearwood: There were not trails, there were board sidewalks. Through a lot of the green belt area so that the walking distance from upper Meadow Road, I mean take for instance an example, you could walk down the other side on the board walk and come out back of Chapel on the Hill and then on down into Jackson Square.
Mr. Lauderdale: These walks were built by laying two logs down, you see, and then about three-foot boards across them. And they were controlled by the logs laying three feet apart and then boarded transverse to them.
Interviewer: Now they were primarily used by the neighbors…
Mr. Yearwood: …residents…
Interviewer: …to and from, going to and from shopping and...
Mr. Yearwood: …going to and from wherever you wanted to go. They were boardwalks to walk on. For instance one of the most spectacular fires that anyone ever saw was over on the landfill. When they got through gathering up all the boardwalks in Oak Ridge and laying concrete and blacktop sidewalks, they had all those boardwalks stacked up over there, and they decided the easiest way to get rid of them was to burn them. And that was some fire.
Interviewer: I bet it was.
Mr. Yearwood: You take a network of boardwalk that covered the, not all of Oak Ridge now, but all of Oak Ridge as it was then, and you had quite a few feet of boardwalk.
Mr. Lauderdale: I lived on the corner of Georgia Ave and Gordon Road which is about half way from Townsite to Outer Drive, and there was a board walk that went down by Blankenship field, down through the woods there, on the east side of Blankenship field down to Jackson Square. That’s how my wife would go down to buy groceries at the Community Store which was beyond…
Mr. Yearwood: Where Lyn ?Stringler? now has a store?
Interviewer: That’s where the old Jackson Hardware used to be?
Mr. Yearwood and Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah.
Mr. Yearwood: Jackson Hardware went in there after.
Mr. Lauderdale: After the Community Store went out.
Mr. Yearwood: But, in those early days, gasoline was rationed. People couldn’t go many places, and the places that they could go, they couldn’t drive up that gasoline a lot within city driving; so you walked places. And they tried to put a walk, I guess every place that indicated that somebody was taking a shortcut.
Mr. Lauderdale: And people just didn’t have cars. I didn’t have a car.
Mr. Yearwood: No didn’t have cars.
Mr. Lauderdale: I had a car in 1940 when I went to the West Indies and left it with my wife in Chattanooga and she came down in the middle of ’41, in June or something like that, but she sold the car, sold it for $300. She came back a year and a half later, went and asked the boy about buying it back from him, and he said he’d take $900 for it.
Mr. Yearwood: That kind of reminds me of the time that Chuck Davis got the fleet contracts with Ford and Chevrolet. He was quite a...
Mr. Lauderdale: …organizer.
Mr. Yearwood: Organizer and a man that took care of his people that worked with him. And he negotiated, he was sharp enough to negotiate with both Ford and Chevrolet for a fleet contract. And he lined everybody up in sequence of who got the first car, the second car, and second third car, and on down, whether it was a Ford or Chevrolet and whichever one it was that came in, why that’s the one we took. I’ll never forget it. Took it on the condition of their present vehicle. And I was the head of the list, except for the man ahead of me, and he didn’t have a car at all. So you can imagine what I was driving around. But yeah, I was offered almost double for the car that I got without anybody, without the man in the ??? ever seeing it. He just said I’ll give you X number of dollars for a brand new Ford.
Interviewer: Now was this a R&W car or was this…?
Mr. Yearwood: No this was a personal car that, R&W paid mileage for the use, for a personal car for the individual. R&W couldn’t get automobiles either. But a good way to get a job with R&W was to have a car. I mean you going to have to get around on the job, was to have a car, and help pay for your mileage.
Interviewer: This is kind of off the subject but I think its interesting, with the types of houses that we’ve had here in Oak Ridge, and the cemestos, and you mentioned that about cars, the pecking order so to speak to get a car. What about houses? How was that arranged?
Mr. Lauderdale: That was by allotment to individual companies, organizations.
Interviewer: People that moved to Oak Ridge just automatically did not move into a house. They had to have some, I guess status at one of the plants, did they not?
Mr. Yearwood: And, size of the family decided a lot of it. In other words, John said, each operating unit in Oak Ridge, Recreation and Welfare, Y-12, K-25. They had so many houses assigned to them. And of course they had more houses assigned to them than Recreation and Welfare had assigned. And I have another personal experience with the housing proposition. I first lived in a little flattop out on the east, East Arrowwood, out overlooking Milt Dickens Softball Field. Came time that I was eligible for a new little house that was built up off of Louisiana. But it was too small. Well, they didn’t have any cemestos in Recreation and Welfare that were available at that time. So they negotiated with Y-12 to swap houses. They’d swap a B house on a ??? road for this little new house off the corner of Louisiana up near Lasalle. That’s the way I got a first B house. I think there were a lot of things that entered into who got a house, and the size of the house that you got was dependent almost entirely on the size of family you had or the clout that you had.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah that was, how you ranked with your...
Mr. Yearwood: Well this is the way whole society works today, in private industry today, the man that’s got the clout gets the biggest benefits. I mean that’s just the way things happen. But there were, as I say, allotments for each plant, for each operating contractor. I’m sure J.A. Jones had so many, and, what was the operating company, I mean contracting company that operates that place right up back of where the Municipal Building is now? Seems like… the name begins with S.
Mr. Lauderdale: Construction company?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that still...
Mr. Lauderdale: Stone and Webster?
Mr. Yearwood: Stone and Webster.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes.
Mr. Yearwood: They had so many houses. But none of them had the houses that the, I mean the number of houses, that those who had more employees had because, but as you say, if you didn’t always have a house when you came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Generally, the...
Mr. Yearwood: I came to Oak Ridge and I was here 8 weeks before I had got a house.
Mr. Lauderdale: Generally, the operating contractors had preference over construction companies. I mean say J.A. Jones may have 5,000 employees but they wouldn’t get as many as one of the operating contractors who had permanent, more permanent status.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah. Because most of them, contractors, their employees migrated into Oak Ridge by choice.
Mr. Lauderdale: They were craft units.
Mr. Yearwood: They were craft units and I know when I was stationed at Fort Loudon Dam in Lenoir City, right at the end of the time we were getting that job finished, men in Lenior City were migrating to Oak Ridge to follow their craft. They didn’t know what they were doing over here. One of the safety officers over there bought him a bus and he started transporting them when they got so many. And so I think the craft people more migrated into Oak Ridge on a daily basis. And the population would have been twice that I guess because there’s at least as many people migrated into Oak Ridge as lived here permanently.
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh yes, I’d say so.
Mr. Yearwood: I mean worked here. That’s because, the way I understand it or always heard, I don’t know, a lot of hearsay gets blown up and all, but the working force in Oak Ridge was 75,000 people. That meant that if there was 75,000 in Oak Ridge there are a goodly number coming into Oak Ridge from outside for work on a day-to-day basis.
Interviewer: Now those workers had to come through the strategic gates that are still intact, in some instances, throughout Oak Ridge. From a historical standpoint would you all like to see the City maintain the old guard shacks or a least one as far as…?
Mr. Yearwood: I don’t know where any original guard shacks exists.
Mr. Lauderdale: No.
Mr. Yearwood: These guard shacks like you’re talking about on the Turnpike going into the K-25 area?
Interviewer: Right.
Mr. Yearwood: They’re not original.
Mr. Lauderdale: No they were built...
Mr. Yearwood: The originals were right at the gates.
Interviewer: On the east end of town out at Elza?
Mr. Yearwood: …east end of town.
Mr. Lauderdale: Elza…
Mr. Yearwood: Edgemoor, over the Edgemoor Bridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Edgemoor Bridge, and up at Hilltop, it wasn’t a four lane road but there was...
Mr. Yearwood: There was a two-lane road coming in that way. And the Governor himself can’t, tried to come through the gate up there one night without an identification badge, and he said “Boy, I’m the Governor”, and they said “I don’t care who you are Governor, says you can’t come in.” But no, these are...
Interviewer: I know that they’ve been remodeled and smaller...
Mr. Yearwood: No those were built just like they are.
Mr. Lauderdale: Those were built…
Mr. Yearwood: At the time it took the restrictions off of Oak Ridge...
Mr. Lauderdale: When they opened the town, they built that one at Y-12, the one over at Kerr Hollow, the one out here on the Turnpike. I worked with ??Tom Wentback???. I didn’t work on those things, but I worked on some other jobs for him at the time when he was doing it. He was the contractor for building those concrete ????
Mr. Yearwood: Those were built after the original guard, basically.
Mr. Lauderdale: Those were built in 1948.
Mr. Yearwood: Yep and then they took the other gates down in 1948 and started restricting everybody. And there was a greater restriction to go through those than it had to be to come through these out here. In other words a man that worked a K-25 wasn’t supposed to go through that gate and going out the other gate to go fishing. The only thing he was supposed to do was to go through that gate to go to work. Previously they’d had a badge to get on, right on through that area and out the other end without any hesitance or restrictions or nothing down there. Of course they lowered those restrictions, took the guards off them entirely, and anybody’s free to drive that open highway now.
Interviewer: Do ya’ll remember the open sesame celebration in 1948?
Mr. Yearwood: Oh yes.
Interviewer: That was...
Mr. Yearwood: I got a few pictures of them stashed away somewhere.
Interviewer: We had some VIPs, didn’t we, come to Oak Ridge that time, movie stars or... ?
Mr. Yearwood: Movie stars I forget now.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes I forget who they were.
Interviewer: That was a big gala event.
Mr. Yearwood: It was quite a big event. Who cut the ribbon?
Mr. Lauderdale: Somebody, some celebrity.
Interviewer: Back to the, if I may… Were you going to say something?
Mr. Yearwood: Well, we dealt a good bit when we started talking today, about outdoor facilities. But I think to gain a feeling of the immensity of the whole recreation field, we should talk about some of those other activities that went on indoors. Of course the Recreation and Welfare Association had first call upon usage of school athletic program fields or facilities, after the schools used them. We operated neighborhood community centers in every school that was in existence at that time: after school programs, early evenings say 8 or 9 o’clock. We used all the gymnasiums. We split the scheduling of teams into school facilities. I guess we still do.
Interviewer: That’s a benefit that a lot of people probably do not understand, that it started back in 1948 or earlier than that, and we’re very fortunate that we continue that relationship with the Oak Ridge Schools because we do sublet the gymnasiums and so forth after 5 o’clock in the afternoon and this is kind of unique I think, still…
Mr. Yearwood: It is unique.
Interviewer: …in the country today.
Mr. Yearwood: All the years that I’ve been to conferences, recreation conferences, I find that more and more are trying to get a relationship with the schools to use. A lot of them do, but there are a lot of them that are still striving to get that working. The people pay for the facilities and the schools use it which is fine, but then they lie idle x number of hours which is wasted money. So, well, Recreation and Welfare had an advantage that all the rest of them haven’t had and that is that the powers that be, on the hill, said it shall be this way.
Mr. Lauderdale: Same owner owned the schools and owned the Recreation and Welfare.
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right and now, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. In some schools it was great, in others we had a little friction every once in awhile. Either with the classroom teacher objecting to her room being used as the arts and crafts project after school hours or the physical education teacher only encouraging the gymnasium for his gymnasium use or the principal not wanting people running in and out, but by and large it was a close knit cooperative thing. I know I didn’t mean to say that these people fought the idea they were just a little bit more prone to call your attention to some little something that had happened. And too, it was what made it work so great was the cooperative attitude of the custodians of the building. They knew where the first permit was going to be. They were at the door to let that group in and that group had to be there as a whole to get in, because he’s going to lock that door until their time to leave and the time for the next one to come in, and he went right on doing his work. Now, if a custodian hadn’t been willing to alternate their working plans in order to accommodate us, we’d have had a difficult time. We might have to employ somebody just to be the doorman to let people in and out.
Interviewer: That’s the problem that we’re running into today. Custodians have so many additional duties that they can’t be there…
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right. In those days they had far more custodians, I’m sure they have today. I can see where it would be a problem. Now also, of course we had the recreation centers and youth centers too that have constant programming going on all the time. We had bowling alleys, 10 bowling alleys at Central called Central Bowling Alleys. They were under the...
Interviewer: I remember bowling there.
Mr. Yearwood: You remember where they are at. I can’t think of what’s in that building now. That also was the sight of the first youth center that I visited upon coming to work at Oak Ridge. Then we had bowling alleys at Grove Center. We had bowling alleys at Jefferson. We had bowling alleys at Midtown. And bowling was a big, big double shift in every alley every night and…
Interviewer: I’d like to talk to you a little bit further about the various indoor facilities and maybe expand on the outdoor facilities again the next time we get together but we’re running out of tape on this particular segment. John, Rabbit, I want to thank you again for participating in this taping and we’ll try to close it out at this time. This is March 5, 1985.
Transcribed: November 2005
Typed by LB

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ORAL HISTORY OF CARL “RABBIT” YEARWOOD AND JOHN LAUDERDALE
Tape 2
Interviewed by Bill Sewell, Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge
March 5, 1985
Interviewer: This is Bill Sewell, Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge. Today is March 5, 1985 and I’m talking to “Rabbit” Yearwood and John Lauderdale, longtime Oak Ridgers and early Oak Ridgers, about the recreation programming back in the 1940’s. John, Rabbit I appreciate you coming down today. The leisure services, as what we refer to them today was originally under the direction of the Recreation and Welfare Department. Could someone, Association, excuse me. Could someone explain what the Recreation Welfare Association was?
“Rabbit" Yearwood: I’ll attempt it and I’m sure John will jump in and add a word or two as we have in this free discussion. Recreation and Welfare Association was an organization set up by the Clinton Engineer Works, the builders of Oak Ridge, which in turn were under the Corps of Engineers which was overall our, you might say, Oak Ridge development in every way. The way they accomplished this was to set up Recreation and Welfare Association which was to be a self-sustaining organization and to operate under a council or a committee or a….
John Lauderdale: It was called a recreation council, which was made up of representatives from the operating contractors.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, some of those were American Industrial Transit, Roane Anderson Company, Dupont, Tennessee Eastman, Berkeley, Union Carbide and it seems like there might be, well, the Army had a representative on that I believe, because they participated in all the major city wide activities. I’m not sure.
Interviewer: Was Union Carbide a member back in those days or were they …? Mr. Yearwood: Union Carbide operated K-25 there. Dupont operated Oak Ridge National Lab area and Tennessee Eastman operated Y-12. Berkeley…
Mr. Lauderdale: Berkeley operated another separation plant. It was another alternate method of separating the U235 isotope, in addition to the gaseous diffusion and the electromagnetic separation at another, and all I know, I know a little about the principle of it except that they call it the steam separation, and it was evidently unsuccessful because, see the electromagnetic separation was the one that could produce a high enough enrichment to get the reaction. In other words, the two bombs that were used, the only two that have ever been used in combat, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were made from the products from the Y-12 plant. Effectively the gaseous diffusion, as of that moment, was not considered capable of producing a high enough assay to be used in explosives. And, later on it was upgraded, perfected and developed and it supplanted the electromagnetic because of the ???? bomb similar to what the other methods. Now the centrifuge and the laser acted on processes are on the horizon as far as replacing the gaseous diffusion.
Interviewer: John, did council, and Rabbit, the council that you spoke of a few minutes ago, the recreation council, was that a governing body? Did they have the authority to make rules and impose fees and so forth?
Mr. Yearwood: Yes, they, the council formed the operating unit known as Recreation and Welfare Association, and employed an executive director to manage the operation of the Recreation and Welfare Association. Then he set up the operation methods we had within recreation. We had a physical recreation department, a social recreation department, a nursery school. We had nursery schools. We had recreation centers, which were mostly under the direction of the social. They sponsored dances. Then they had the money making operations to offset the cost of participating activities. And, I think we touched on most on the first tape. We had movie theaters. We had the Ridge, Central and in Jackson Square area, and at Midtown, one at Grove Center and one in the Jefferson area. John, did we have one at Wheat, I mean at K-25 area?
Mr. Lauderdale: No. Wheat operation was separate and R&W never did have any activities there.
Mr. Yearwood: Only one time. That was at Christmas and I had to go out there and play Santa Claus.
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh did you? You know something that I don’t. They had a, I would think, limited, we went and discussed it several times, I don’t think we ever had any organization. They had a school….
Mr. Yearwood: I remember just before it happened -?Temp?- Jerrel and ???? and Shep Lauter and I all went to inspect the old Wheat High School with the possibility of taking it over as a recreation facility.
Interviewer: Where was that located? Wheat High School?
Mr. Lauderdale: Well if you, do you know where the road…
Mr. Yearwood: Route 137…
Mr. Lauderdale: From Highway 58 out there and goes over to Blair, goes through that road. About a few hundred yards off of present Oak Ridge Turnpike, Highway 58, there’s an old brick building. There was a church in there and a crossroads store, and a building that I believe was used for what they called in those days, a ?teachery? That was the place where the assembled teachers for the consolidated high school could keep a collective residence. Many of them were single women, some married women and I guess a few men. Mostly the teachers in those days were women and they would have a, well they run their own ???? facilities, living...
Mr. Yearwood: This was pre-Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah. That was pre-Oak Ridge of course.
Mr. Yearwood: But that was…
Interviewer: I think I know the area you are talking about, as you just turn right on Blair Road and just right around in that pine thicket over there on the corner, right.
Mr. Lauderdale: The building itself was redwood…they had a good size school now, on the other side.
Mr. Yearwood: The school is what we...
Mr. Lauderdale: Other side of the road and it was back in where the trailers residences or whatever they had.
Mr. Yearwood: That school was the elementary school, now. The other school that I was talking about we were about to take over for the recreation center, was what I thought was the Wheat High School.
Mr. Lauderdale: It was Wheat School, I assume it was high school.
Mr. Yearwood: It might have been Wheat School prior to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes.
Mr. Yearwood: Which they had built a new school within that trailer area, which was the largest trailer area in the whole operating… wasn’t it?
Mr. Lauderdale: Seemed like there was, I have the number 17,000. I don’t know whether that was population or...
Mr. Yearwood: That’s about right because I think there’s somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 trailers. Of course, I know they had bowling alleys down there, because they bought some old bowling alleys out of Knoxville from a place that I used to operate in previous years.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well they had a merchandising area I guess you say.
Mr. Yearwood: Oh yes, shopping area.
Mr. Lauderdale: Shopping area and gasoline filling station, you know, and things like that but that was down the hill. Now this area that was where they had the school and all the trailers and so forth, was on the high ground you could say...
Mr. Yearwood: To the left of the...
Mr. Lauderdale: Something like immediately off to the left of where the Blair Road takes off but on the other side of the Turnpike. These other buildings were down nearer to the plant area, and they were operated by the same people. I couldn’t, Howe Sharon ????Alexander, Frank Tucker, the man that was in H.T. Hackney, I’ve forgotten what his name was, and I believe the Chrysler Plymouth Dealer in Knoxville was Cunningham, something like that. Anyway I think there were six partners in this ????
Mr. Yearwood: But any recreation that was carried on in that area was carried on by J.A. Jones I guess, because I know that the first time I came to Oak Ridge, to come by to investigate a job, it was with J.A. Jones Company, and their headquarters were located along that 58 and, everything looked pretty promising until I says, at the end, well now how about some housing? And his answer ended the conversation. I went back to Fontana and waited until something else came up which was Recreation and Welfare Association but...
Interviewer: You were talking a few minutes ago, maybe on the other tape, when Oak Ridge had 75,000 people estimated at one time, back in the early 40’s. I would imagine the recreation facilities support for 75,000 including the shift workers and everything else, did we have recreation programming going around the clock?
Mr. Yearwood: We had it going around the clock. K-25 I know for instance, right where the entrance to Downtown is now, or about where Moby Dicks could be, from there back up to where the first Baptist Church is now, in that area, we had two softball fields, known as Farmer’s Market #1 and #2. They were assigned to K-25 and they had shift leagues. They had a league when that particular shift was working, then when they worked at 4 o’clock, well, they played in the morning prior to going to work, and ones that came off, say 11 to 7 also played morning leagues. I mean wherever that shift, whatever time they worked determined what time they played that week. And, I would say that K-25 probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 softball teams playing on those two fields. Of course Pinewood, present Pinewood Park was, I guess the original top grade softball park, and they had one at Elza, which is now Milt Dickens Field. They had two administration fields located back of the Administration Building. One of them I guess had a helicopter port built on it and that’s still there, plus we had two softball fields there. We had a softball field in back of the Jefferson Tennis Courts that the girls and women used exclusively at that time. We had Oakwood Baseball Park, which is now you know what…
Interviewer: Carl Yearwood.
Mr. Lauderdale: I’ve heard about that.
Mr. Yearwood: We also had a #2 baseball park just up from that, kind of in dead center field from it, that was first used for a practice purpose and then used a little later as a starting field for the boys’ baseball program in Oak Ridge. Now, right off I can’t think of any other softball fields.
Interviewer: Rabbit, with all this activity and 75,000 people, how did you have a, did they have a maintenance crew to maintain these fields at night and what about movie theaters, were they open twenty-four hours a day?
Mr. Yearwood: Oh, movie theaters were open early morning until late at night, because they were almost round the clock, because people were working, and there were more people working on each shift then than work now in all ???? So you really had three populations to provide for. Going back to softball, X-10 had their own leagues, Y-12 had their own leagues, and we had city leagues like fast pitch and slow pitch and most every type of softball, and the baseball teams they tended to have are about equal to the lower class professional league, they had some real fine ball players.
Interviewer: Is that the old Pioneer team?
Mr. Yearwood: No this was the...
Interviewer: Prior to that...
Mr. Yearwood: ...league but teams from each operator. AIT had a team, ???? had a team, Y-12, X-10, I mean it was a league. Now the Pioneers were one team, one pro team that played in a league with other cities.
Mr. Lauderdale: That was professional?
Mr. Yearwood: That was a professional league. But the early leagues that we had in Oak Ridge were about comparable in playing ability as that Pioneer league, but when the population dropped so much baseball gradually faded out of the picture as far as local sponsorship of individual teams was concerned.
Interviewer: About when did the population drop from a peak of 75,000+, when did you, do you all remember an approximate time when the population really started decreasing?
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh it started decreasing, I’d say within two or three months after the Hiroshima drop. I guess the Japanese surrender; I don’t know the month that was in, was it October ’47, ’46?
Mr. Yearwood: ’46.
Mr. Lauderdale: The European surrender was in the spring, after the April offensive, and the other was in…
Interviewer: So you started seeing a decrease in the population in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Yearwood: I would say over night.
Mr. Lauderdale: They began to, just right off close or stop construction, the first thing was affected was construction. Like Rabbit said the other day, a fellow had his hand up in the air he didn’t skip a nail he just put his hand in the air. All construction, all further development ceased.
Interviewer: John what did you do out at, in the early days in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lauderdale: Well, I was in charge of the maintenance caretaking along the R&W facilities, janitorial of course, of the buildings and some kind of caretakers for the outdoors, rather meager, but wasn’t ever satisfactory but we had such a … and also I had supervision of the beer sales.
Interviewer: I want to talk to you about that in a few minutes. I had a feeling that you were going to bring that up.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well I don’t advocate very much because I am certainly not ashamed, but I had such an opportunity. Really the facts are such that when I, if I could really quote the facts they would sound like tremendous exaggerations. Shall we go into that?
Interviewer: Yeah I think we’ve got a few minutes on this side of the tape. I’d like to talk about that beer sales?
Mr. Lauderdale: The reason for the excessive sales was that through the military, we had access to military allotments, and we could make a contact with breweries in this area, that is, the area of St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and so forth. This was territory that they would rather sell to for consumption within the continental United States than sell it to the military and ship it over seas, because they had a potential for building up trade territory, you know, for post war. I was told that the first money that actually came into the Recreation and Welfare was that they got a carload of beer and sold it. Now that was before I arrived, but I believe they sold it from that old recreation business down in Jackson Square.
Interviewer: Now you’re talking a carload, you’re talking about a train carload right?
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes.
Interviewer: Not a carload automobile.
Mr. Lauderdale: Not a highway car.
Mr. Yearwood: One day sale.
Mr. Lauderdale: And we did a tremendous business. I believe I covered that in the other tape the other day, about some of the quantities.
Interviewer: What was the price of beer back then?
Mr. Lauderdale: Only one that I specifically remember was Erdley 92, made in ????, it was shipped in the steinic bottle and it was $2.65 plus a deposit of 75 cents on the case and box.
Interviewer: $2.65 for a case?
Mr. Lauderdale: $2.65 for a twenty-four-bottle case. I believe that Berger sold for something over $3, and we had several other brands and we sold them, Weideman’s Royal Amber was one, and Narragansett, I think all the Narragansett came in that military.
Mr. Yearwood: I think that’s what we buried out there in Gamble.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah, that of course was Rhode Island Brewery, I know but from the Cincinnati area we had Fabarosa, was a Red Top Brewing Companies premium brand. Champagne Velvet was brewed somewhere in Indiana I believe, and seems to me we got something out of St. Louis…..and seems like we had one from Evansville. Since I have no records or anything it’s strictly memory.
Interviewer: John, did the revenue that was taken in from the beer go to offset in the R&W program?
Mr. Lauderdale: It went right into the revenue of the R&W program. We had a welfare payment and there was a welfare organization that dispenses, and I don’t know the individuals in it, I did know at the time, but we turned over and seems to me like $2,500 a month or $25,000 a year or something like that. We also published the Oak Ridge Journal newspaper, and it seems to me that Major Bill Bonnet’s sister was head of the welfare organization. I’m not sure. I know she worked for some, see these other entities such as the newspaper and the welfare and nursery school were somewhat operated independently. I didn’t have anything to do with the maintenance on their buildings they were somewhat removed and rather obscure to the...
Mr. Yearwood: Money to operate went to them?
Mr. Lauderdale: We just turned the money over to them and they spent it. We didn’t kind of keep their check registers and so forth.
Interviewer: Do any of you recall, or you might not have been involved in it, but do you recall what maybe the budget was for the R&W program? I’m sure it was probably broken down into several different areas but…
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh, I just don’t know. I worked on it and I abhorred it. It was a terrible thing to work on, but it seems to me like it was several hundred thousand dollars. I think I remember that the wholesale revenue from the theater was $100,000 for one year but it was up in the $100s total. Of course we had some minor revenue like charging for dances and things of that kind that furnished for certain activities, minor income, but the motion picture theaters and the sale of beer were the two large producers. We had a few concessions, for instance, a man had a popcorn stand at the Center Theater.
Mr. Yearwood: At every theater.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well, at Center Theater and Jefferson Theater. He was from Cookeville. I can’t remember his name but he paid us $1,075 a month for the privilege of running those popcorn stands and he had one at the Midtown Beer Tavern. He thought that was going to be a good deal to sell popcorn to go with beer. It was a total bust entirely….
[Side 2]
[gap of blank tape]
Mr. Lauderdale: He was from Cookeville and he sent his brother down here. His brother was older than him, and he didn’t have anything very much to do, I think, and he came down here to run those popcorn stands. Now the one out at Jefferson Theater never made very much of a profit. See he had these three locations there, Jefferson Theater, Center Theater and Midtown Recreation Hall. He soon closed the one up at Midtown. The Jefferson Theater was never popular and it didn’t pay his popcorn business very much more than operation of it.
Interviewer: For the benefit of those that might listen to this tape, the Center Theater is now the Oak Ridge Playhouse in Jackson Square and the Jefferson Theater is used now by the Oak Ridge Dance Studio and it’s still located on Jefferson Circle. And of course the Midtown Theater is where the Civic Center is located, in the general vicinity, okay go ahead.
Mr. Lauderdale: He paid his brother for operating it and he told someone, and it came back to me, that he declared as income for that year, in 1946, $9,000 for himself. So you might say that that one popcorn stand paid $1,075 a month concession fee and the cost of labor and cost of supplies and cost of manager, whatever he paid his brother, and he paid him $9,000 out of that one popcorn stand, because the Jefferson one would just about break even and the Midtown one closed up after about two months of operation.
Interviewer: You know as a child, I remember I could go to the Center Theater on a Saturday, and for a quarter I could go to the Center Theater for 9 cents and see a couple of movies, a serial of cartoons and also buy popcorn and cokes because the cost of popcorn was not too expensive. He must have sold a lot of bags of popcorn in those days to make that kind of profit.
Mr. Yearwood: Everybody went into the Center Theater with a bag of popcorn ‘cause they’d go up and buy, everybody stood in line, nothing to do except eat popcorn while waiting at the ticket office.
Mr. Lauderdale: Someone else had a popcorn machine down at the bus terminal. And whoever that was I’m sure did alright ‘cause it was a lucrative business.
Interviewer: The bus terminal you’re talking about now is located at French’s Plaza or Security Plaza?
Mr. Lauderdale: That’s right in that same area.
Interviewer: Did we not have two bus terminals? Main bus terminals in Oak Ridge in those days?
Mr. Yearwood: Jefferson and Jackson Square.
Mr. Lauderdale: The Jefferson was down in right there, it’d be on the right, right hand side of the Jefferson Avenue as you go up.
Interviewer: And that’s where all the buses would drop the men and women workers off?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that was a transfer point.
Mr. Lauderdale: Transfer point. I’ve heard that number 900 buses that were operated here.
Mr. Yearwood: I wouldn’t be surprised because if you go out anytime and get on a bus, at first, I understand, you just got on it, and that was it you rode where you wanted to get off and you got off. Later they started charging a nickel, to get on and ride as far as you wanted to or transfer.
Mr. Lauderdale: I think that was after the war.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah.
Mr. Lauderdale: After the war, after the armistice was signed. But they had buses that ran to Maryville, Tazewell, and I guess down halfway to Chattanooga. I don’t know just where all they did run, I’m sure it went up past LaFollette.
Mr. Yearwood: There were an awful lot of independent bus drivers, bus operations in those days of Oak Ridge. But I remember when I first came in 1945, my family was still living in Fontana, North Carolina and I’d go up there on the weekends. But I would, on Saturday, I would, if I didn’t get away before the shift change, why I waited until after the shift change and all the buses were off the highway before I’d start to go to Knoxville. I mean it was a long straight line. And we didn’t have four lane highways at that time. We had one little two lane highway between here and Knoxville that went this way, or this way, or this way, zig zagged a good bit, because in those days, they were built, they had to build it out by John Jones, and that’s fictitious name, owned by Jimmy Smith, or somebody else, whereas today they build them straight but...
Mr. Lauderdale: We did have one road, what is now 62 into Knoxville was built during the war and later. It wasn’t completed until about the time the war was over as I remember.
Mr. Yearwood: That started out as a two-lane road, it’s still two lane.
Mr. Lauderdale: And the 25W road was completed out to Clinton by the time the war was over. They were working on it in, and then the four lane highway was completed.
Mr. Yearwood: One of the main routes into Knoxville was the 62 and the Clinton Highway which was, both of them were, two lanes, 62 to Knoxville now is a two way traffic highway, isn’t? It’s not four lanes…?
Interviewer: No it’s...
Mr. Yearwood: It’s two lane but...
Interviewer: Certainly the engineers that designed Oak Ridge are to be commended because of the hindsight, I guess, as far as developing the Oak Ridge Turnpike. Do you recall if the Oak Ridge Turnpike, of course there probably was not as many cars back then, because they had buses transporting the workers around, but do you remember it being heavily used, even back then?
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh yes.
Mr. Yearwood: It was the only thoroughfare. Tennessee Avenue catches a lot of traffic now. I notice Emory Valley catches a lot of traffic, and it’s broken up now, but it couldn’t have handled in those days what the thoroughfares in Oak Ridge handle now.
Interviewer: Were there bike trails back in those days, Rabbit?
Mr. Yearwood: No.
Interviewer: I know there were trails connecting communities or streets.
Mr. Yearwood: There were not trails, there were board sidewalks. Through a lot of the green belt area so that the walking distance from upper Meadow Road, I mean take for instance an example, you could walk down the other side on the board walk and come out back of Chapel on the Hill and then on down into Jackson Square.
Mr. Lauderdale: These walks were built by laying two logs down, you see, and then about three-foot boards across them. And they were controlled by the logs laying three feet apart and then boarded transverse to them.
Interviewer: Now they were primarily used by the neighbors…
Mr. Yearwood: …residents…
Interviewer: …to and from, going to and from shopping and...
Mr. Yearwood: …going to and from wherever you wanted to go. They were boardwalks to walk on. For instance one of the most spectacular fires that anyone ever saw was over on the landfill. When they got through gathering up all the boardwalks in Oak Ridge and laying concrete and blacktop sidewalks, they had all those boardwalks stacked up over there, and they decided the easiest way to get rid of them was to burn them. And that was some fire.
Interviewer: I bet it was.
Mr. Yearwood: You take a network of boardwalk that covered the, not all of Oak Ridge now, but all of Oak Ridge as it was then, and you had quite a few feet of boardwalk.
Mr. Lauderdale: I lived on the corner of Georgia Ave and Gordon Road which is about half way from Townsite to Outer Drive, and there was a board walk that went down by Blankenship field, down through the woods there, on the east side of Blankenship field down to Jackson Square. That’s how my wife would go down to buy groceries at the Community Store which was beyond…
Mr. Yearwood: Where Lyn ?Stringler? now has a store?
Interviewer: That’s where the old Jackson Hardware used to be?
Mr. Yearwood and Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah.
Mr. Yearwood: Jackson Hardware went in there after.
Mr. Lauderdale: After the Community Store went out.
Mr. Yearwood: But, in those early days, gasoline was rationed. People couldn’t go many places, and the places that they could go, they couldn’t drive up that gasoline a lot within city driving; so you walked places. And they tried to put a walk, I guess every place that indicated that somebody was taking a shortcut.
Mr. Lauderdale: And people just didn’t have cars. I didn’t have a car.
Mr. Yearwood: No didn’t have cars.
Mr. Lauderdale: I had a car in 1940 when I went to the West Indies and left it with my wife in Chattanooga and she came down in the middle of ’41, in June or something like that, but she sold the car, sold it for $300. She came back a year and a half later, went and asked the boy about buying it back from him, and he said he’d take $900 for it.
Mr. Yearwood: That kind of reminds me of the time that Chuck Davis got the fleet contracts with Ford and Chevrolet. He was quite a...
Mr. Lauderdale: …organizer.
Mr. Yearwood: Organizer and a man that took care of his people that worked with him. And he negotiated, he was sharp enough to negotiate with both Ford and Chevrolet for a fleet contract. And he lined everybody up in sequence of who got the first car, the second car, and second third car, and on down, whether it was a Ford or Chevrolet and whichever one it was that came in, why that’s the one we took. I’ll never forget it. Took it on the condition of their present vehicle. And I was the head of the list, except for the man ahead of me, and he didn’t have a car at all. So you can imagine what I was driving around. But yeah, I was offered almost double for the car that I got without anybody, without the man in the ??? ever seeing it. He just said I’ll give you X number of dollars for a brand new Ford.
Interviewer: Now was this a R&W car or was this…?
Mr. Yearwood: No this was a personal car that, R&W paid mileage for the use, for a personal car for the individual. R&W couldn’t get automobiles either. But a good way to get a job with R&W was to have a car. I mean you going to have to get around on the job, was to have a car, and help pay for your mileage.
Interviewer: This is kind of off the subject but I think its interesting, with the types of houses that we’ve had here in Oak Ridge, and the cemestos, and you mentioned that about cars, the pecking order so to speak to get a car. What about houses? How was that arranged?
Mr. Lauderdale: That was by allotment to individual companies, organizations.
Interviewer: People that moved to Oak Ridge just automatically did not move into a house. They had to have some, I guess status at one of the plants, did they not?
Mr. Yearwood: And, size of the family decided a lot of it. In other words, John said, each operating unit in Oak Ridge, Recreation and Welfare, Y-12, K-25. They had so many houses assigned to them. And of course they had more houses assigned to them than Recreation and Welfare had assigned. And I have another personal experience with the housing proposition. I first lived in a little flattop out on the east, East Arrowwood, out overlooking Milt Dickens Softball Field. Came time that I was eligible for a new little house that was built up off of Louisiana. But it was too small. Well, they didn’t have any cemestos in Recreation and Welfare that were available at that time. So they negotiated with Y-12 to swap houses. They’d swap a B house on a ??? road for this little new house off the corner of Louisiana up near Lasalle. That’s the way I got a first B house. I think there were a lot of things that entered into who got a house, and the size of the house that you got was dependent almost entirely on the size of family you had or the clout that you had.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah that was, how you ranked with your...
Mr. Yearwood: Well this is the way whole society works today, in private industry today, the man that’s got the clout gets the biggest benefits. I mean that’s just the way things happen. But there were, as I say, allotments for each plant, for each operating contractor. I’m sure J.A. Jones had so many, and, what was the operating company, I mean contracting company that operates that place right up back of where the Municipal Building is now? Seems like… the name begins with S.
Mr. Lauderdale: Construction company?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that still...
Mr. Lauderdale: Stone and Webster?
Mr. Yearwood: Stone and Webster.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes.
Mr. Yearwood: They had so many houses. But none of them had the houses that the, I mean the number of houses, that those who had more employees had because, but as you say, if you didn’t always have a house when you came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Generally, the...
Mr. Yearwood: I came to Oak Ridge and I was here 8 weeks before I had got a house.
Mr. Lauderdale: Generally, the operating contractors had preference over construction companies. I mean say J.A. Jones may have 5,000 employees but they wouldn’t get as many as one of the operating contractors who had permanent, more permanent status.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah. Because most of them, contractors, their employees migrated into Oak Ridge by choice.
Mr. Lauderdale: They were craft units.
Mr. Yearwood: They were craft units and I know when I was stationed at Fort Loudon Dam in Lenoir City, right at the end of the time we were getting that job finished, men in Lenior City were migrating to Oak Ridge to follow their craft. They didn’t know what they were doing over here. One of the safety officers over there bought him a bus and he started transporting them when they got so many. And so I think the craft people more migrated into Oak Ridge on a daily basis. And the population would have been twice that I guess because there’s at least as many people migrated into Oak Ridge as lived here permanently.
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh yes, I’d say so.
Mr. Yearwood: I mean worked here. That’s because, the way I understand it or always heard, I don’t know, a lot of hearsay gets blown up and all, but the working force in Oak Ridge was 75,000 people. That meant that if there was 75,000 in Oak Ridge there are a goodly number coming into Oak Ridge from outside for work on a day-to-day basis.
Interviewer: Now those workers had to come through the strategic gates that are still intact, in some instances, throughout Oak Ridge. From a historical standpoint would you all like to see the City maintain the old guard shacks or a least one as far as…?
Mr. Yearwood: I don’t know where any original guard shacks exists.
Mr. Lauderdale: No.
Mr. Yearwood: These guard shacks like you’re talking about on the Turnpike going into the K-25 area?
Interviewer: Right.
Mr. Yearwood: They’re not original.
Mr. Lauderdale: No they were built...
Mr. Yearwood: The originals were right at the gates.
Interviewer: On the east end of town out at Elza?
Mr. Yearwood: …east end of town.
Mr. Lauderdale: Elza…
Mr. Yearwood: Edgemoor, over the Edgemoor Bridge.
Mr. Lauderdale: Edgemoor Bridge, and up at Hilltop, it wasn’t a four lane road but there was...
Mr. Yearwood: There was a two-lane road coming in that way. And the Governor himself can’t, tried to come through the gate up there one night without an identification badge, and he said “Boy, I’m the Governor”, and they said “I don’t care who you are Governor, says you can’t come in.” But no, these are...
Interviewer: I know that they’ve been remodeled and smaller...
Mr. Yearwood: No those were built just like they are.
Mr. Lauderdale: Those were built…
Mr. Yearwood: At the time it took the restrictions off of Oak Ridge...
Mr. Lauderdale: When they opened the town, they built that one at Y-12, the one over at Kerr Hollow, the one out here on the Turnpike. I worked with ??Tom Wentback???. I didn’t work on those things, but I worked on some other jobs for him at the time when he was doing it. He was the contractor for building those concrete ????
Mr. Yearwood: Those were built after the original guard, basically.
Mr. Lauderdale: Those were built in 1948.
Mr. Yearwood: Yep and then they took the other gates down in 1948 and started restricting everybody. And there was a greater restriction to go through those than it had to be to come through these out here. In other words a man that worked a K-25 wasn’t supposed to go through that gate and going out the other gate to go fishing. The only thing he was supposed to do was to go through that gate to go to work. Previously they’d had a badge to get on, right on through that area and out the other end without any hesitance or restrictions or nothing down there. Of course they lowered those restrictions, took the guards off them entirely, and anybody’s free to drive that open highway now.
Interviewer: Do ya’ll remember the open sesame celebration in 1948?
Mr. Yearwood: Oh yes.
Interviewer: That was...
Mr. Yearwood: I got a few pictures of them stashed away somewhere.
Interviewer: We had some VIPs, didn’t we, come to Oak Ridge that time, movie stars or... ?
Mr. Yearwood: Movie stars I forget now.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes I forget who they were.
Interviewer: That was a big gala event.
Mr. Yearwood: It was quite a big event. Who cut the ribbon?
Mr. Lauderdale: Somebody, some celebrity.
Interviewer: Back to the, if I may… Were you going to say something?
Mr. Yearwood: Well, we dealt a good bit when we started talking today, about outdoor facilities. But I think to gain a feeling of the immensity of the whole recreation field, we should talk about some of those other activities that went on indoors. Of course the Recreation and Welfare Association had first call upon usage of school athletic program fields or facilities, after the schools used them. We operated neighborhood community centers in every school that was in existence at that time: after school programs, early evenings say 8 or 9 o’clock. We used all the gymnasiums. We split the scheduling of teams into school facilities. I guess we still do.
Interviewer: That’s a benefit that a lot of people probably do not understand, that it started back in 1948 or earlier than that, and we’re very fortunate that we continue that relationship with the Oak Ridge Schools because we do sublet the gymnasiums and so forth after 5 o’clock in the afternoon and this is kind of unique I think, still…
Mr. Yearwood: It is unique.
Interviewer: …in the country today.
Mr. Yearwood: All the years that I’ve been to conferences, recreation conferences, I find that more and more are trying to get a relationship with the schools to use. A lot of them do, but there are a lot of them that are still striving to get that working. The people pay for the facilities and the schools use it which is fine, but then they lie idle x number of hours which is wasted money. So, well, Recreation and Welfare had an advantage that all the rest of them haven’t had and that is that the powers that be, on the hill, said it shall be this way.
Mr. Lauderdale: Same owner owned the schools and owned the Recreation and Welfare.
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right and now, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. In some schools it was great, in others we had a little friction every once in awhile. Either with the classroom teacher objecting to her room being used as the arts and crafts project after school hours or the physical education teacher only encouraging the gymnasium for his gymnasium use or the principal not wanting people running in and out, but by and large it was a close knit cooperative thing. I know I didn’t mean to say that these people fought the idea they were just a little bit more prone to call your attention to some little something that had happened. And too, it was what made it work so great was the cooperative attitude of the custodians of the building. They knew where the first permit was going to be. They were at the door to let that group in and that group had to be there as a whole to get in, because he’s going to lock that door until their time to leave and the time for the next one to come in, and he went right on doing his work. Now, if a custodian hadn’t been willing to alternate their working plans in order to accommodate us, we’d have had a difficult time. We might have to employ somebody just to be the doorman to let people in and out.
Interviewer: That’s the problem that we’re running into today. Custodians have so many additional duties that they can’t be there…
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right. In those days they had far more custodians, I’m sure they have today. I can see where it would be a problem. Now also, of course we had the recreation centers and youth centers too that have constant programming going on all the time. We had bowling alleys, 10 bowling alleys at Central called Central Bowling Alleys. They were under the...
Interviewer: I remember bowling there.
Mr. Yearwood: You remember where they are at. I can’t think of what’s in that building now. That also was the sight of the first youth center that I visited upon coming to work at Oak Ridge. Then we had bowling alleys at Grove Center. We had bowling alleys at Jefferson. We had bowling alleys at Midtown. And bowling was a big, big double shift in every alley every night and…
Interviewer: I’d like to talk to you a little bit further about the various indoor facilities and maybe expand on the outdoor facilities again the next time we get together but we’re running out of tape on this particular segment. John, Rabbit, I want to thank you again for participating in this taping and we’ll try to close it out at this time. This is March 5, 1985.
Transcribed: November 2005
Typed by LB